2 Answers
2

I recommend using SMART initially, assuming your hardware supports it. This would confirm bad block problems which you can deal with accordingly. If it isn't the disk you can look into sar, iostat, hdparm, and dtrace?

It was a problem specific to my setup. I connect my USB hard disk via a USB cardbus adapter, which has two USB ports. If on the other USB port I connect a wireless adapter, my hard disk stops working randomly. So, the problem in my case turns out to be insufficient power supply to my cardbus USB adapter.